Discovering (Lily Dale #4)(47)

In Geneseo, New York. Her name is Laura Logan.





TWENTY

New York City

Friday, October 12

12:08 a.m.

Laura turns onto her stomach and bunches the pillow beneath her cheek, willing herself to fall asleep.

It never works.

Nothing ever has.

She’s had insomnia for as long as she can remember. She’d thought it might get better once she left Geneseo.

If anything, it’s grown worse.

Every night, she lies awake remembering what it was like to live in that house with the woman she’d grown up believing was her mother.

Then along came a stranger who knocked on the door one day last spring and changed everything.

It was a warm afternoon, and Laura had snuck out of the house to soak up the sunshine, sitting in a lawn chair tucked just behind the front porch. She often sat there on nice days, not wanting to be seen by passersby.

Old habits die hard.

All her life, she had been teased about living in the neon purple house. As if the paint job had anything to do with her.

“It’s my mother’s favorite color,”she would explain, as if that made it better, somehow.

But it beat the truth: that Mother had always believed for some reason that the purple would ward off evil spirits.

She had always been superstitious—not like regular people, who might not walk under a ladder or sit in the thirteenth row on a plane.

No, she was superstitious to the extreme, paranoid about everything—just plain crazy, Laura eventually realized.

That’s why she had escaped every chance she got—even if just to sit outside in the sun and pretend, for a while, that she was a normal person living a normal life.

If she hadn’t been out there on that beautiful day last spring, she never would have overheard the conversation between Mom and the man who came to the door.

She never would have discovered that she, Laura Logan, wasn’t the daughter of a crazy woman and the nameless, faceless man who had supposedly run off and left her mother before Laura was even born.

Her real father was the stranger on the porch.

He introduced himself as Tom Leolyn and said he had given up his newborn daughter to an illegal adoption ring more than twenty years ago. Her real mother had been told the baby hadn’t survived.

They were just kids at the time, he said. He hadn’t known any better. It had all been a terrible mistake.

Laura sat in stunned silence, listening—and waiting for the inevitable violent reaction from Mother.

Who really wasn’t her mother at all.

For Laura, that discovery was the answer to her most fervent prayer—that she would somehow find a way to escape her oppressive existence.

Father Donald, the kindly parish priest in town who had befriended her when she was a forlorn little girl, had always promised that her prayers would be answered one day, if she only had faith.

Faith, and hope. Those were the two things he wanted her to have. She clung to both in all those miserable years of abuse at the hands of a mentally ill woman who should never have been allowed to raise a child.

That, Laura realized as she sat there eavesdropping, must have been why Sharon Logan had resorted to illegal adoption. No one in their right mind would entrust a baby to her.

“I’ll need to think about this,”she told Laura’s real father that day at her doorstep, after a long silence. “Tell me where to reach you.”

Laura—who had witnessed a lifetime of ranting fits over the slightest mishap— was shocked by the response.

“I’ll give you my phone number,”Tom began, but Mother interrupted him.

“I’ll take that, and your address, too. So that I know where you are, when it comes time to find you.”

It was an odd thing for her to say, Laura thought.

But then, Mother was nothing if not odd.

The stranger gave her his address, somewhere in Maine, and went on his way, and Mother never said a word about it.

Laura waited until Mother left the house to run errands, then searched the house until she found—under Mother’s mattress—the papers that proved the stranger correct.

Standing there holding the proof that she had been bought, as an infant, like a piece of livestock, Laura sobbed.

Not sorrowful tears.

Tears of sheer relief.

And the blanket of guilt that had smothered her for as long as she could remember—guilt for not loving her own mother— began to lift at last.

Now it all made sense.

Now she was free to run away and never look back.

She huddles deeper into the blanket, trying to forget what she’d had to do in order to make that happen.

Stealing all that money from Mother was probably wrong.

Probably?

Of course it was.

But it was her only option. She had no money to her own name. Mother demanded that she hand over every cent she earned at the data-entry job she’d been working since high school graduation. Laura had always been well aware that all that cash was hidden around the house. Mother was much too paranoid to keep it in a bank.

When she helped herself to thousands of dollars from the stash, Laura reminded herself that she was only reclaiming what was rightfully hers.

Without it, she couldn’t have fled to New York City, found an apartment, bought a decent wardrobe so that she could find work.